Transportation woes for Boston Public Schools (BPS) families continued this week, but Mayor Wu and Supt. Mary Skipper say that operations are improving as a newly implemented app used to help on-time performance is “getting smarter and smarter.”

Wu and Skipper addressed the issue on Tuesday morning on Columbia Point outside the newly renamed Ruth Batson Academy, formerly the BCLA McCormack School, thanking parents for being patient despite a week-and-a-half of delays for the 22,000 BPS families that rely on school buses.

“Now on the ninth day, we've seen our on-time performance coming up continually each day in a positive way,” said Skipper. “It's not where we want to be yet, but we are moving in the right direction. And we really appreciate the parents' patience in making the system better.”

BPS measures bus performance by two key data points – the number of students who arrive no later than 15 minutes late, and the numbers who arrive no later than 30 minutes. Skipper said they are now at 90 percent of students getting to school no later than 15 minutes after the bell. On routes that needed major adjustments, or where new students were introduced to a route requiring adjustments, some 98 percent were arriving no later than 30 minutes after school starts.

She noted there had been a flood of late enrollees and changed addresses, with 2,500 new students or new locations since Aug. 9.

“I'll just say, as a mom, every single minute of learning time is incredibly important for our young people,” said Wu. “And, so, getting them to school on time isn't just about making sure we hit certain percentages or numbers. It's about giving them time to get settled in their classrooms, to get breakfast, to just have the best possible day that they could have. It all starts with how they get there and how they feel when they get there. That builds on how we do with reliability on buses.”

While many stories have been reported citywide about bus troubles, parents report having struggled with the Zum app to get their children to school, to locate them en route, and to ensure that they get home.

In one situation last Wednesday (Sept. 11), a seven-year-old boy wih autism was supposed to leave the Joseph Lee School on Talbot Avenue and arrive at Levant Street around 2:30 p.m. But by 4 p.m. he hadn’t arrived, prompting family members to call Boston Police.

According to th BPD, the mother of the boy used the Zum app to track his bus to Navillus Terrace and Winter Street on Meetinghouse Hill, where the bus was parked and had been idling for 45 minutes with the boy, the driver, and a bus monitor on board. Police reported that the driver had gotten lost and wasn’t using the Zum app to help him find his route. The boy was returned to his mother without incident.

Skipper said there has been a learning curve with the Zum app for drivers, but she rejected speculation that some drivers, displeased with their contract, might be sabotaging the system.

“Sometimes [the drivers] were pressing things that either terminated the route or began the route early,” she said. “And so that also led to some of the data being very low. I think we're up to about 98 percent of the drivers using the app consistently. And what we've heard from the drivers is that it's actually really helpful.”

Skipper said they have been working very hard to customize the app and defended BPS’s move to a more technology-based system to improve performance, which peaked last year at 90 percent – five percent below the state benchmarks for BPS.

“We were using a clipboard system and paper printouts that was a 30-year-old system,” she quipped.

Skipper and Wu noted the Zum app updates routes and efficiency algorithms every Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, so they expected even better results later this week as the app continues to learn.

“There'll be new routes and the drivers will be adapting to those new routes,” Skipper said of the update. “But we'll be correcting routes that were taking longer than they should have…Every week it'll become smarter and smarter. And one of the things that attracted us to this technology was its ability to adapt and become smarter.”

BPS Director of Transportation Dan Rosenberg said the app was not just about route efficiency, but safety and transparency – a theme echoed by Wu. The app allows parents and bus drivers to pinpoint pick-up and drop-off locations and times.

“Also, if the bus is running more than 20 minutes behind schedule, there's an automatic push notification that goes out to notify families of that,” he said.

The mayor said her instinct is to “know what's happening on the ground,” so she, Skipper, and senior transportation officials committed to riding several problematic routes this week citywide to get a ground-level view of what’s going right and what’s going wrong.